Sticks and Stones
by chaserzachsmith
Summary: In increments, Susan recovers from the war.


The Bones family had been all but wiped out over the wars- most of them in the first. Susan grew up with hardly any family, just her mother and her aunt Amelia. It was an odd family they made, two women and a little girl, but it was a happy one too.

Susan supposes she was lucky in that regard.

It's altogether too easy to take things for granted, she knows. She's taken a lot of things for granted in twenty years. A happy family, for one thing. Having money. Knowing that you would eat the next day, and sleep safely.

She doesn't take these things for granted anymore. She has food stored in a bag on her person at all times, cans stacked in her pantry. She knows a dozen protective spells. She's saved money squirreled away and hidden around the Townhouse, hidden in her bag disguised as a maxipad. There isn't much she can do about her family. Most wiped out in the first war, and her mother and aunt in the second. What a sad thing the Bones family is, now. Nothing left but a twenty year old. She won't even carry the name on.

Oh, well. That's hardly her fault. It's the damned patriarchy.

"Not everything is the patriarchy, you know," yawns Ernie. "And you can hyphenate."

"Bones is a terrible name to hyphenate," says Susan. "It sounds morbid."

"Whatever you say, Sue," says Ernie, who isn't all that bothered by Susan's plight. He's still got dozens of cousins to carry on Macmillan with him. And he's a man.

Typical, that.

* * *

Her mother had woken her up the morning after Scrimgeour had died. They had packed quietly and quickly, canned food and clothes and medical potions and blankets. Her mother had filled Susan's backpack with as much as she put in her own. Handed it to her and said, "Keep it close to you in case we're separated."

Susan had taken it, something sinking in her stomach. Her mother was all ferocity and worry. Susan, by contrast, was all knobby knees and worry. They hadn't Apparated from home, but had taken a bus to Hampton and Apparated from there.

Susan had packed photographs. Old pictures of her mother and her aunt and her, even older pictures of her mother and father and grandparents. She stayed awake at night, when they were protected in their campsite, and stared at her family, waving dustily up at her. She wondered if this war was going to be the end of the Bones family.

One down, and two left to go. And the two left to go were alone in the woods with nowhere to go.

* * *

After the war, she had gone back to school, probably because there wasn't anything else to do. Or, really, immediately after the war, she had spent the summer at Hannah's house. The Bones estate- the Townhouse- it was already too big for just her and her mother and aunt, and it would be enormous for just her. And she'd been worried about Hannah. Then, she'd gone back to Hogwarts.

Hannah cried for most of the train ride, then again when they got to the carriages and they saw the thestrals, and Luna Lovegood took her hand and said, quietly, "Don't be afraid. They're very gentle."

Susan felt like an intruder, somehow.

The Common Room felt stifling, the Great Hall heavy with whatever memories everyone had made there. Nobody seemed comfortable anywhere in the castle, least of all Susan's friends. Justin studied like his life depended on it. Hannah started gardening. Ernie stayed in the Common Room almost constantly.

Susan didn't know where to go. She wandered the castle, for a month. Found scorch marks on the walls and wondered who put them there. There was a big crack in the Great Hall, under the bench directly where she used to sit every day for breakfast. She had seen it crack, had seen the spell that did it. She felt terribly sorry for the students who could remember the spells behind every other scorch mark or crack or bloodstain in the school.

One day she went up to the library and found an empty spot to sit. Somehow the library still felt exactly the way it used to.

* * *

When she had been on the run she had saved photographs and trinkets from her friends. All things that had meant something sentimental, all things that weren't worth anything in the real world. She had kept them in her bag and looked at them at night. Had pressed her thumb over Hannah's face and wished for a chance to see her again.

She had missed Hannah more than anyone else. She had worried desperately about her, especially when she'd gotten a radio and started to hear the rumours about Hogwarts on Potterwatch. Ernie too of course, but Ernie had a sensible mind and hated to rock the boat. Hannah, though, Hannah was grieving and never dealt well with stress and was always on edge and always trying to help others. Hogwarts must have been awful for Hannah.

* * *

Susan and Hannah and Megan Jones spend a lot of time together after the war, Hannah stressing out about the DA or the Aurors or her clothes or the Leaky Cauldron, and Megan giving them funny anecdotes about whatever case she's on, and Susan telling them all the gossip she gets from the Patils and from Michael.

Hannah asks Susan and Luna to be her maids of honour two weeks after Neville proposes to her. "It was too hard to pick," she explained, and Luna laughs.

Susan remembers before the war when it wouldn't have been a question at all, but somehow there's no twinge of envy, no bitterness about it. Hannah's lucky, really, to have Luna and Susan both.

Ginny is Neville's best man, which they all think is fantastic, and when the wedding comes Susan stands with Luna in deep, warm purple and she thinks that Hannah deserves a wedding this lovely.

The reporters are wild, but Ginny threatens a few of them and they back off somewhat. Susan and Hannah sort through dozens of pictures the next morning and Hannah doesn't cry at all, even though she looks like she might.

"I wish my mum had been there to see me get married," she says, finally, when they've given up on the photos and gotten out the leftover wedding cake instead. "I hope she would have liked it."

Susan wishes Hannah's mum had been there to see it, too. "She'd have liked it," she promises.

That night when she comes home Michael's wedged into the corner of the sofa, reading. He needs glasses to read now; they make him look even more doubtful and suspicious than he is by nature. Susan drops into the couch next to him and says, "You ought to call your mum and tell her you love her."

"She knows," mumbles Michael, who isn't big on emotional confessions.

"She could stand to be reminded," says Susan. She shakes his arm jokingly and he shrugs and looks away. Susan feels compelled to add, "You love her."

"Sue, the only reason you like my mum so much is because she's not your mum," says Michael. But Susan really does like Michael's mum. Maybe because she misses her Auntie and her own mum and Hannah's mum. Maybe Michael's mum is the closest thing she has anymore. Which is a little sad, and something she would never tell Michael.

* * *

In first year, Susan had asked her mother and aunt if there was something wrong with their family. She was the only one in her dorm who didn't have a father. The only one without any grandparents or cousins or distant relations.

"There's nothing wrong with being a Bones," her mother had said, tight-lipped. "We're happy."

"Why don't I have a father?" she had asked.

"Your father died, Susan," said her mother. "You know that."

"So did Blaise Zabini's dad," Susan had said. "But his mother got married again." Three times, according to Megan Jones.

"Your mother is a picky woman," said Auntie, and Susan had grinned. "And your mother is not a Zabini."

"You don't need a father, Susan," said her mother. "You have us."

* * *

After the war she had tried hard to find out what had happened to her mother. She dug through the records of Snatchers' captures and kills, used her job in MLE to go through classified files. She knew where she had left her mother- in a forest near Glasgow - and she knew the date- December 10th. She knew that there had been more than one Snatcher and at least one had been a woman. She couldn't remember anything else.

Unfortunately, You-Know-Who hadn't prioritized recordkeeping. Especially recordkeeping when it came to fugitives caught in the woods. She only found records of a group of Snatchers who had caught a family of five in an abandoned barn near the forest.

Azkaban had been emptied of blood traitors and Muggleborns, but Susan's mother hadn't been among them. Susan wonders if her mother is one of the unmarked graves outside the prison, or if her mother is rotting in that forest in Scotland.

She wonders if the Snatchers would have buried her. She doesn't think so.

There is something so unforgiving, so disgusting about the thought. Susan can't bear to think of her mother unburied in the forest.

"I'm not going to lie," says Michael as she is packing. "I think this is a really bad idea."

"It's important," says Susan. "I'll be fine."

"Me being in Hogwarts again was a horrible idea," he reminds her. "Played hell on my health. Maybe you being in a tent in Scotland again isn't the best idea."

"That's different," says Susan. Michael's parents had sent him back to the place he'd been tortured and traumatised. Susan was just going camping.

* * *

In eighth year Michael too had spent his free time (and, she suspected, his class time as well) in the library, and Susan had heard enough whispers about what'd happened to him to understand why he'd hide from the school. She supposed they were two sides of the same coin, in a sense.

He hated Hogwarts because he'd been there last year and because he understood the real magnitude of the damage, and she hated Hogwarts because she hadn't and she didn't. It was fitting in a way.

She used to knit, sitting on the floor between the encyclopaedias and the almanacs. Mostly because she refused to be the kind of person who was in the library every day to read. Michael had come by one day helping Madam Pince shelve and asked, "How do you knit?"

"With yarn," she said, and he'd snorted and almost fallen over.

She taught him how to knit on the grass outside the greenhouses and he lay back with an unfinished scarf and said, looking up at the sky, "I should come outside more often."

"Probably," Susan had said. At that point he'd been rather like a dark-skinned vampire, uneasy and washed out and tired.

"I can almost forget where I am," he said, staring up as though he was trying to memorise it.

* * *

She sort of regrets going alone. She would never tell Michael this, because he gets smug when he's right, but she hates camping alone. Even if she has a lot of food, a good bed, a tent. She's still alone in the woods again and it's starting to make her jumpy.

She looks up at the sky but the treetops block her view; she's surrounded on all fronts, unable to avoid the reality of where she is.

Hannah Floos her on her cooking stove three nights in and Susan says miserably that she's miserable.

"Where exactly are you?" Hannah says.

"What?"

"Where are you?"

Hannah Apparates in with a duffel bag of clothes and a box of chocolate and her own sleeping roll for the tent. Susan doesn't let on how relieved she is to have company but she's sure Hannah can see right through her. They spend a week more in the woods, but they can't find a trace of Susan's mother. Susan is a little disappointed, but she suspects Hannah is glad for it. And it would have been unpleasant anyway to find a body.

They Apparate back to the room over the Leaky Cauldron with the tent and their bags, and they drink black coffee at three in the morning and cry onto each other, careful not to wake Neville, who has been running the Leaky alone for a week and must be exhausted.

"I hope you can find something," Hannah says. "I miss your mum too."

Susan shakes her head. "She's dead," she says, and glances out at the street below. "She'd want me to keep living, right?"

"I think so," says Hannah.

"Then," says Susan, "That's what I'm going to do."

"Good luck," says Hannah, and she takes Susan's hand and clutches it tightly.

* * *

She'd been out shopping with her mother when her aunt had been murdered. They'd come back to the Dark Mark and the Townhouse ravaged- Susan remembers her mother's scream and the way her own stomach had dropped past her knees.

They had spent the rest of the summer fixing that side of the house. Repairing destroyed furniture and burned wallpaper. Painting over her Auntie's blood.

"I suppose it's lucky they left us any of the house at all," her mother had said bitterly, as they were cleaning up the smashed china. "In the first war- they used to burn them down."

"They never burned this one?" says Susan.

Her mother sat back on her heels and looked around. "I'm sure they think once they've wiped us out, they can take it."

The Malfoys had the Manor, the Notts had the Estate, the Greengrasses had the Manse, and the Boneses had the Townhouse. It had two stories, ancient chairs and loveseats and new, colorful lamps that her Auntie had collected. A cozy fireplace and a painting of a mother and child, warm rugs and elegant side tables.

"It wouldn't be the Townhouse if it wasn't ours," Susan had said, inspecting her thumb to see if she'd cut it on a saucer.

"It's not about the Townhouse," her mother had replied. "It's about power."

"What kind of power?" Susan asked. "We're just- us." They hadn't even had Auntie Amelia as the head of Magical Law Enforcement anymore, just Rachel and Susan Bones. An accountant with Gringotts Bank. A student who'd only gotten two Os on her OWLs.

"The power to take what they want, Sue," said her mother.

"Oh," Susan had replied.

* * *

"I'm going to be the last one," says Susan. She and Hannah are visiting Megan Jones in her flat in Bromley.

"Last what?" says Megan.

"The last Bones," says Susan.

There's a pause. "Oh," says Megan.

Susan regrets saying anything. "It's alright," she says.

"It's sad," says Hannah.

"It just means I have to make it count," says Susan, and she smiles a little. "So the Boneses can go out with a bang, right?"

Hannah pats her hand.

* * *

In her third year of school when Sirius Black had broken out of Azkaban, Auntie Amelia had shaken her head.

"Mind," she'd said, "I never thought he was convicted all too fairly, but it's a shame he's out in the world. He's a dangerous man."

Susan had grown up learning about Azkaban, and about the witches and wizards left there to rot. Her aunt said they were the worst of the worst, the scum of the earth. Susan learned the names of the Death Eaters who'd been convicted in her grandparents' murders. Her uncle Edgar's murder, and the murder of his entire family. In her aunt Irene's murder and her second cousin Jason's murder.

She learned them all, committed them to memory, and in her fifth year the names were blazoned across the front page of the Daily Prophet. She walked through the week in a daze, and wondered if they were going to finish the job.

* * *

She doesn't want her children to grow up with the names that had belonged to other Boneses. It's not quite fair- the expectations would be too high for a second Amelia or a second Edgar or a second Alan. No, she gives them meaningless names that she likes, Julia and Nathan and Robin. Nothing too deep about it, nothing from her family's long and unhappy past.

Susan is unmarried, so that her children can take her last name. Michael is the only one with parents to scandalise and he's agreed to sacrifice his honour for it. They'll get married eventually, probably, but for now she'll remain a Bones, and her children will too.

They will grow up in the Townhouse, which is starting to fill up again for the first time since the first war had nearly wiped out her family.

"Look at you," she coos to baby Robin. "You're going to grow into a Bones."

Robin starts to cry, and Susan nods, smiles. "That's right, it's a morbid name," she agrees. "But it's mine, and I don't mind it."


End file.
